Intention & Impact: Creating Employee Connection in Remote Teams With Justin Tsatsa

So when you, you know, like literally two months after you joined the company, you're like, okay, now like I haven't even had a chance to meet everyone, but now I have to be behind the screen.

Were you in charge of creating engagement opportunities and like helping people feel connected or was that someone else's role?

It was me and one other person who was in charge of our Madison office and our manager.

And it was basically just like, all right, let's try to figure this out, I guess.

Yes, how do we stay connected? How do we kind of build that engagement? And that's kind of what my role shifted into a little bit in terms of that.

And it was interesting.

you know, what games are out there? What can we do? Besides like happy hours, all that fun stuff, because we've done that too.

So

what did you start with? I'm sure you've tried a billion things.

What are all the things you tried?

Yeah, you know, we did the we did the main ones.

We did happy hours.

We did virtual coffee chats.

We tried a co working thing where basically you would just open your zoom and people could come in there and work at the same time.

We started to learn that employees were getting burnt out from Zoom fatigue, from Slack fatigue.

And here we were trying to throw more on top of that, too, of like, okay, yeah, take some time off from the work you're doing and come chat with employees like your other employees on Zoom still.

There wasn't any structure.

It was just like grab a coffee, grab a glass of wine, whatever, and just come and talk.

And by that point of the day, everyone was like, I don't want to do this.

So it became a matter of how do we tailor that into something that's more meaningful and a little bit more impactful? It wasn't about like the quantity of things that we offered.

It was the quality of things that we offered.

So now we've put our resources and we actually participate in the Chicago Pride Parade.

So things like that that would make it a little bit more impactful versus just doing some coffee chats and stuff here or there.

That was a very long winded roundabout.

No, no, you're good.